No One Survived - Review
This game feels like a Chinese game developer took the lovechild of 7 days to die and grabbed some inspiration from other games, threw it in the oven to bake for a while, made a nice little candlelight dinner, and then released it, and I have to say, it's a pretty solid attempt at what it's trying to do, be a new exciting zombie survival game. However, it also has a looong way to go.
Let the apocalypse begin
Ah, there we are, in my favorite part of any indie game, the main menu, which can hide dark secrets like no settings menu, broken buttons, and more, but also beauties like an atmospheric background and music, a working tutorial, and all those kinds of dreams.
And, well, this game smacks right into the middle of those 2. It has everything you'd expect, including a settings menu, a singleplayer button, a multiplayer button, and even a tutorial. However, the menu and the game in general are severely hampered by something that I must directly talk about.
Duolingo, are you there?
I CAN'T UNDERSTAND HALF OF THE DAMN GAME, okay, now I'm exaggerating a little, it's not half of the game, but it's a large portion of it, it's very clear that the game was fully made in chinese and only machine translated after, there are so many miss translations that google translate is a very likely suspect, however, this isn't the worst offender, as some parts of the game such as certain item descriptions are completely in chinese, which makes it imposible to even guess what they might be trying to say, this makes it quite hard to do the following things:
Change the settings for your game lobby.
Change your in-game-settings,
Not going insane while trying to figure out what a certain item might do.
Keeping Duolingo from pipebombing you for skipping your chinese lesson.
It really affects the overal quality look of the game, sure you might be able to figure out what settings do by tweaking around a bit, but it looks just straight up really unprofesional, and for a 15 euro game I would honestly expect better.
Please hold my hand
Now luckily the game does have a tutorial, altough well… In machine translated english with some chinese sprinkled in, but luckily it does a pretty good job at teaching you some of the basics, it however is sadly a bit too short for my liking, as it skips over a lot of things such as farming, how you level up your skills, how to clean water, etc etc.
This in combination with the questionable english troughout the game cause a problem
I feel like I just woke up from a nap
This game is just plain confusing at times, the combination of the too short tutorial and bad english means that zombies aren't always your biggest challenge, instead its trying to figure out how to grow a potato without setting your entire base on fire, which is a shame, but a lot of this could be fixed if the dev team hired an actual translator.
But how does it play?
Okay, enough negativity; let's take a look at how it actually plays, and well... it's actually quite entertaining; it reminds me of 7 Days to Die, with some inspiration from games like The Forest and Day Z.
Because there is no quest system in this game, it feels a lot more relaxed than 7 days to die, and allows you to build, survive, explore, and thrive at your own pace. The zombies provide a good challenge while not making the game unbearable, and even if they do for you, this is easily fixed because the game has some handy sliders for things like zombie attack frequency, the amount of zombies you will encounter in the map, how much loot you will find, and more.
Braaains
This brings me to the next point in my review, the Z',s. As it is, after all, a zombie survival game, we have to talk about the zombies, and I have to say, the developers did a pretty good job with the zombies.
I saw a few different variations of how they can look, which is always nice, you have some slower zombies, faster zombies, and terrifying running zombies, and on top of that, you have a nice amount of sliders to customize the frequency of them to your liking, the only shame is that they almost never drop anything when you kill them, making the zombie hordes that come every 7 days (or whatever frequency you set them to) quite unrewarding for the player.
Sandcastles
Now let us move on to the next very important aspect of surival games: building. Can you build skyscrapers, or will you struggle even to make a sandcastle? Well… It's somewhere in the middle, but mostly leaning toward the skyscraper example, the game has a pretty nice amount of buildable objects, allowing you to create quite the comfortable house with spikes and walls all around, the game has everything right now to keep you safe from the zombies; of course the developers need to add a bit more over time to make it even more in depth, but in general I'd say its quite satisfactory.
Roadtrip
The game's map is actually quite large, just a quick look at the map shows you such things as a huge mall, multiple compounds of houses, a gigantic mall, some docks, and way more, it will take you plenty of hours to get trough and as of writing this review I definitely haven't explored everything yet, far from it, but I do have to say that it is quite impressive.
I did, however, read in one of the reviews that some of the houses are still empty, which is concerning, but I haven't seen this myself, and the developer has stated that they are working on it, so I won’t be too harsh for it, but still, its good to keep in mind that some of the places might just be like Nuketown.
Bugs
I haven't encountered many bugs, I've never gotten stuck anywhere, I've never clipped through a wall, and I've never seen a teleporting zombie, so it feels pretty good in my book. I did, however, experience a few annoying lag spikes at various points, but these appear to be getting better and less frequent, which, while encouraging to note, are still extremely annoying.
GIVE ME MY CAN OF BEANS
Ahhh, THE BREAD AND BUTTER OF ANY SURVIVAL GAME, the looting ,the whole world has gone to shit, zombies are walking everywhere, and you, some random guy who was in the middle of microwaving a sandwhich when patient 0 developed, are tasked with surviving the aftermath of the apocalypse. Your best friend for this? Looting. Nothing beats finding a can of beans in a cupboard as you're about to die of malnutrition or finding the sight for the gun you found a few days ago, allowing you to finally headshot zombies with flare.
Okay, I'm slightly straying from my point, so let's talk about looting in this game, it's pretty alright, just like with the zombies, there are some sliders to change loot frequency and when it respawns, allowing you to customize it to your liking, there is a nice variety of items to find (though the variety of drinks, weapons, and clothes could be increased a bit), and looting cupboards etc doesn't take too long to become a chore, i’d say that its honestly what you could expect of any generic zombie survival game.
Bland
See what I did there at the end? I called it a generic zombie survival game because that's exactly what it is; it doesn't have many unique features at the moment; sure, it borrows some nice features from other games, such as the zombie hordes from 7 days to die, but it's not particularly unique in any way at the moment, and that's actually... sort of okay? Because, in all honesty, it is a good zombie survival game; it is just not unique, which may be more of a problem for some than others.
Conclusion
This game has potential, and it definitely has some nice ideas, but right now the bones need a bit more meat on them to really become appetizing, it's kind of generic, and the faulty English definitely doesn't help with the overall quality look of the game, but it does provide a fun experience if you can get 1 or 2 friends to join you for this.
7.2 out of 10.
We at NLM received a key for this game for free, this however didn’t impact our review in any way.